Give users access to the advanced configuration parameters

@FreshFromTheGrave

Very odd, but perhaps the post was removed whilst they decided whether I was going to be a problem for them or not!

I'm still perusing my options, but I'm now becoming keener on the idea of the Secure Meters H3747 (Horstmann) 4 channel programmer. It's not cheap at around €250 including the wifi adapter, but it specifically mentions it can be adjusted to avoid the short-cycling issue that I have. It seems Secure Meters are not frightened to let the owner of the device adjust the product they own, themselves. It may not be as user-friendly as the tado, but I am technically minded enough to work through anything it throws my way just as long as I can adjust it to suit my system, which it appears I can. Secure Meters has an excellent customer service team too (I am assured).

I'm sure tado is good enough for many, perhaps most systems in use today. The problem lies in the 1 or 2 percent of owners with less conventional systems. A jack of all trades is master of none. I was perfectly willing to work on the tado system to get it functioning, but all my requests for assistance went unanswered/ignored by tado. And when support goes quiet, I have to assume it's not possible to help me. The chat function was useless for me too. I would always prefer a company to actually tell me "sorry, this is not the right product for you" than ignore me and leave me trying to get something working that never will, but for some reason they feel that silence is better than honesty.

Tado has potential, and as I said, it probably works fine for most, but short-cycling an oil boiler is commonly known to increase fuel usage and wear & tear significantly. All oil boilers work better when burned for as few, long periods as possible as it's the initial firing that uses most oil. Since fitting tado I've never used so much oil, yet the app keeps telling me how much I've saved! With oil now €1 per litre here in Ireland, we have to do what we can to save the precious liquid, so thinking going "smart" would pay for itself in a year or so I had no issues paying out for a long-term gain. I did not expect it to nearly triple my oil usage.

Good luck to everyone suffering with issues, I hope eventually tado begin to listen to the customer that pays their wages rather than ignore them, but I'm afraid I am having to give up as I cannot afford to triple my oil usage for the 'convenience' of a smart system that clearly does not work with my boiler.

@policywonk

Thanks for the info.

It's sad really, it seems there are no heating controller manufacturers that understand no two heating systems are alike. It appears to me that they design something, test it in a handful of homes probably belonging to the designers and their families, and call it done and dusted when it works just about well enough.

I've said it before; tado is actually not awful, backed up by my professional boiler service chap who said if the burn time (and other advanced parameters) were available, it would be fine and up there with Nest and others. It's actually not that difficult to understand, things need fine tuning, what is odd is they just don't allow it, instead they seem happy to be called out on forums like this and take the flack. It begs the question; why?

You'd think one or two of tado's 22 investors would be asking the same thing, as if tado allowed fine-tuning, their overall ratings, and sales, would increase. Then maybe people wouldn't be so miffed when they're asked to pay a subscription just for using the app.

I've had a minor breakthrough in the control of my heating. As its a simple two zone system, switched by a wall thermostat, I've been wondering why I can't just replace the wall thermostat with a "no negative" wifi (light) switch like those made by Tapo. I can control it via the Tapo app and create schedules on the same app to turn the heat on and off. I can even Geofence it! Then I add KASA TRVs to all rads and control the individual room temperatures with those (using the same Tapo app). I can even create routines on Alexa. It solves the one issue tado won't sort; burn time. Gone will be the constant on-off-on-off…..of the tado wall thermostats, the KASA TRVs will control the temperatures the Tapo switch will simply have global control leaving the rest up to the boiler.

I can't see an issue with the plan yet, I'm just replacing a temperature controlled switch with a non-temperature controlled switch, there's no difference between a light switch and turning a wheel thermostat up to max, logic suggests it should work perfectly, in my case.

We'll see!

+1. My room consistently overheats and I'm just so tired of it. The officially given explanation of why tado would overheat make no sense to me at all since I don't have a boiler, instead I'm using district heating. There is not reason at all why tado keeps heating once the target temperature is reached, which it does all the time. I just want a way to adjust this myself so I can calibrate the controller. Please make it happen.

@policywonk I just bought the whole setup less than 2 weeks ago. I already set a temperature offset but that doesn't help. The issue is it will heat to at least 1 degree more than whatever I set, then let the temperature drop to just below the set temperature, then overheat again. So I only have the options of being cold periodically or overheating periodically. The "temperature offset" isn't actually useful, because I could instead just set my target temperature lower by the same amount. But if I set the target temperature to 20 degrees, tado will heat to 21 or even 21.2, then let the tempreature drop to 20 degrees which I find too cold. The whole system is just really poor at controlling temperature, which I find staggering. The software is just bad. My temperature graph looks like a zig zag line.

It generally turns up heating way too much. In the morning, when it should go up from 18 degrees to 19.5, it blasts the radiators at full throttle for over 30 minutes. This is simply ridiculous. I had some hopes in the beginning that tado would learn that the heating in my apartment is really strong and has a ton of lag, so there's no need at all to turn up the thing for that long, or even until it reaches the target temperate. But no such learning appears to be happening. Tado should blast on full throttle at most for 5 minutes at any point, and turn off when it reaches 0.5 degrees below the target temperature. Or even better, never full throttle at all but heat on very low for 20 minutes until we get to around 0.3 below target temperature, then turn heating off and then let the lag in the system sort out the rest.

Instead, just right now, what happened again — target temperature set to 19.5; it's already 19.9 and it's still blasting like crazy. Simply from the lag in the system, it's obvious that this will now result in at least 20.9 degrees even if the heating was completely turned off right now. This is 1.4 degrees above target. There is no way this kind of setup saves energy.

The tado hardware appears to work well but the software, especially the part that's supposed to regulate the temperature, is just really, really bad. I'm already convinced that whatever algorithm tado uses to heat will result in much higher energy usage and bills, because blasting on full throttle in the morning or whenever I come home for 30 minutes is just completely insane. It doesn't even do anything beyond cycling hot water through an already very hot radiator. And it's insane to me that the temperature control doesn't realize this on its own from the massive lag after shutting off, after at least a week of operation.

It's frustrating to me to buy a setup for 400 bucks where the hardware even appears theoretically well but the software is just so bad it defies belief. It's hard for me to imagine any kind of heating system where keeping the heat flow on to at least 0.3 degrees ABOVE the target temperature saves energy and money, given that basically all heating systems have some kind of lag since the radiators stay warm after energy is cut off. I'm a software engineer myself (PhD in computer science, 2019) and the thought alone of having a piece of software so poorly designed, so poorly implemented, so poorly working, controlling the temperature in my room feels stressful.

I had a lengthy comment about the performance of the heating control above the last one, which explained why and how tado overheats, often by up to 1.5 degrees, but it was apparently automatically deleted

One of the reasons I sent all my tado stuff back to Amazon was due to the inability for the system to stick to my rules.

I set the target temperature to 18 degrees because that's what I want it to acheive, then turn off the boiler. No, I don't want it to try to reach 20 degrees…..because it's a bit cold out there.

Yet the next evening I would turn on the heat to 20 degrees to boost the temperature and I would hear the thermostat turn off the boiler before it even got to 17 degrees, what the actual f……?

Ask all you like, but since last April that I know of we've asked for access to hysteresis setting like most other thermostat manufacturers (and I ensured the one I have bought has this "feature") but they refuse for unfathomable reasons to disallow this.

I gave up. And I'm leaving appropriate feedback wherever I go and whoever I talk to. As my boiler service guy said; if only tado allowed access to fine tune settings, it would actually be a good product. Sadly they seem to have their heads stuck in the sand on that point. But not having the ability to set the system to stop short-cycling an oil boiler is a quick way of knackering said boiler.

@policywonk I have tado X, and I bought the whole system 1-2 weeks ago. I'm convinced this whole thing is a software issue. Just for testing, as I came home now and it was 19.5 degrees in my room, I turned on heating with a target of 21 degrees. It kept the water flow going until 21.8 degrees (!), then finally turned it off. Temperature is still rising as I write from the radiator lag. Now already 22.1 degrees in here, an overshoot of 1.1 degrees. With all this talk of "every single additional degree costs more and more energy", there is no way this kind of behavior is useful.

There is simply no way this kind of setup saves energy. The whole behavior of the system simply yells buggy software. Creating software that can handle the myriad of different heating systems that people actually have in their homes is complex, and tado is failing at it; not from the hardware side, but very much from the software side.

E.g., I use district heating, meaning that hot water is supplied to my home externally. There is no oil boiler; there is no use at all for a hysteresis to prevent quick cycling. The system should simply track the target temperature as closely as possible, and it's failing to do that. There is no setting to turn off the hysteresis, or to make it stop heating before reaching the target temperature due to the radiator lag. The constant significant overshoots are staggering and will undoubtedly result in a huge energy bill.